Narrating Law and Environmental Body Politics (in Times of War) in “Indigenous America/America”

Abstract

Taking Lawrence Friedman's History of American Law (1985) as his example, Peter Fitzpatrick recently remarked that near-silence of majority of scholars of American and politics on topic of so-called Indian and America is no mere forgetting of one of America's margins. Having traced ground of modern law to scene of legality at interface of native and nonnative relations in United States, Fitzpatrick suggested this silence is a symptom of the occidental strategy of marginalizing foundational (Fitzpatrick 2001:175). Arguing further that such silence is a profound sign of the of insignificant in U.S. imperial politics, Fitzpatrick went on to discuss ways scene of legality at this relational interface, which I refer to here as indigenous inhabited metaphysics and legal discourses of America's war in Philippines (Fitzpatrick 2001:175). Others have shown same with regard to Vietnam (Drinnon 1980). Now we are witness to same forces at work in Iraq. Fitzpatrick's comments and these gestures toward war begin to surround text before us, Worship and Wilderness: Culture, Religion, and Law in Public Lands Management, with sort of contextualization it demands. Indeed, wherever we use term as Burton does here off and on, post-World War II international discourses are immediately invoked and must be brought into some account. It is against this background, and three decades of dogged official U.S. resistance to recognizing Native Americans as indigenous peoples, that Burton's extended introductory proposal that we use First Natives as our master term in United States so as to make room for immigrant senses of nativity can be read as an indicator of this work's decontextualized politics of narration. I will return to this theme of war, but it is important to note by way of introduction that Fitzpatrick's remarks also begin to indicate a framework by which we can discuss Worship and Wilderness, for there is surely no more profound geography from which to interrogate potency of insignificant in America/ America than interface of religion, law, and environmental body politics. It is, moreover, a form of precisely right question that Burton puts to this geography-namely, question of obscured, more-than-raced differences that are at stake in countless, daily mediations of public, so-called natural resources in which native claims are articulated in religiously inflected terms that reference myth-historic geographies and mundane-ceremonial regulatory regimes that persist across United States against all historical odds. From moment of its enunciation here, however, this question suffers under force of an overwhelming desire to intervene in whiteness by revealing that nonnatives too have religiously formed interests at stake in such encounters. While both attempt to intervene in whiteness and to address nonnative religious imaginaries are tremendously important tasks in project of unearthing suppressed histories America/America, I suggest formulation of this problematic takes shape here under force of national ideologies that leave geography of more-than-raced difference Burton traverses standing in excess of his terms and frame of narration. In responding to Worship and Wilderness, I will gesture to these excesses, to a critical framework concerning as a site of colonial-postcolonial encounter that they entail, and to a more-than-raced history of and environmental body politics that Burton's rendering calls up but obscures. In discussing these issues, I suggest an analogy for reading that this work invites by way of its terms, strategies, and geopolitical scene of narration-Lewis and Clark's imperial trek of discovery in pursuit of a fabled Northwest Passage to Orient. …